8 Useful Foreign Words the English Language Needs to Steal

Despite the fact that dozens of new slang terms enter the English language on a weekly basis (did anyone use "selfie" three years ago?), there are still all sorts of things in our daily lives that just don't have words. But as we've demonstrated before (and before before), they fortunately do exist in other languages: terms that succinctly sum up a situation that would take an entire, often expletive-filled paragraph to describe in English.

Words such as ...

#8. "Farpotshket" (Yiddish)

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What It Means:

Something that was a little bit broken ... until you tried to fix it. Now it's totally screwed.

To demonstrate the usefulness of "farpotshket," look no further than that nightstand you picked up at your friendly neighborhood IKEA. You know, the one that sits completely cockeyed but, goddammit, still does its job so long as you don't hit the snooze on your alarm clock too hard and send everything sliding off onto the floor. Then one day you finally get ambitious and think, "Hell, all I need to do is shorten the other three legs and make it level again! I can do that!" Six hours and a pile of sawdust later, you now have an unusable 12-inch-tall table that, by the way, still wobbles. In Yiddish, you have a farpotshket on your hands.

VatsnewsIt's also the word you least want to hear coming from a mohel.

Leave it to the Yiddish language to contain a word that can at once sound so innocent and so sinister. Just say it out loud: "farpotshket." Maybe wave your hands a little for emphasis. Now, say it louder. Louder. Feels pretty good, right? It's like some unholy amalgamation of every foul word you've ever wailed at that IKEA nightstand after stubbing your toe on it in the middle of the night.

The term has started to become associated with technology and software, probably due specifically to your mom's tendency to click on every "anti" virus program and bullshit "Make your computer run faster!" ad that pops up in her Web browser. Hey, that gives us an idea! Quick, someone who has way more software smarts than us: Dig into the Windows 8 code and see if the developers secretly referred to it as the Farpotshket Edition. We're going to assume so until somebody proves otherwise.

#7. "Yaourt" (French)

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What It Means:

To sing along in nonsensical noises that vaguely resemble the lyrics of a song.

When we tell you that the French have a colloquial verb that literally means "to yogurt," odds are your imagination will instantaneously jump to one particular image. We know what you're picturing. It's not that. Hell, you couldn't possibly be more wrong -- it's not breakfast-related at all.

annalisa-/iStock/Getty Images"Yum, extra nuts."

According to Lucy Wadham, a British novelist who lived in France for nearly a quarter century and wrote a nonfiction book in an attempt to decode Frenchness for her fellow Brits, the French are obsessed with English-language music. So much so that they feel an uncontrollable urge to sing along with it, even if they not only don't know the lyrics, but totally don't know the language that they're singing in. This peculiar pastime is known as "yogurting," and it can send music through such absurd transformations as turning Queen's "I Want to Break Free" into "I Want a Steak Frites." Conversely, it can actually transmogrify "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into the deep social commentary that people always thought it was.

It makes sense that a nation where most music is imported would have a name for such a phenomenon, but the term could come in handy anywhere. Hell, we all spent a year singing along to "Gangnam Style" -- to a fluent Korean speaker, it must have sounded like we were all having some kind of seizure. And while we could refer to this as "Whoppa Gangnam Style Syndrome," it's not like we know the words to English songs, either. When you try to rap T.I.'s verse in "Blurred Lines," would you ever have figured out the line "In a hundred years not dare would I/Pull a Pharcyde let you pass me by" without Googling it?

#6. "Attaccabottoni" (Italian)

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What It Means:

A person who corners you to tell you long, meaningless stories, usually about his oh-so-miserable life.

Sometimes life is sad. We get it. If, for example, your beloved dog had to be put down because it contracted rabies and literally ripped the town sheriff a new asshole, it's completely understandable that you're feeling down, and nobody will accuse you of being a killjoy when you tell them about it. But then, well, there's that one guy. You know him: He's the one who shows up at every social event with the specific agenda of boring and depressing the absolute shit out of any- and everybody by perpetually babbling on about the unbroken chain of catastrophes that is his life.

Alberto Bogo/iStock/Getty Images"And then my cat spilled his water, and it got my socks all wet. I mean I just put them on. And then-"

That cute waitress from your local cafe didn't respond to this guy's texts? He'll make a five-hour Shakespearean play out of it, and you'll be his sole audience. Did it rain this afternoon, and he was planning a round of golf? For you, that's a minor inconvenience; for him, it's a reason to describe every single bad thing that's ever happened to him during his crestfallen clusterfuck of a life in details so colorful, they'd make James Joyce chub up.

In America, we'd probably call this guy an asshole and leave it at that, but that wouldn't exactly serve as fair warning to others in regard to just what they're in for should they ever encounter him. In Italy, though, they make it quite clear with one simple word -- this guy is an attaccabottoni. It doesn't matter if the amount of fucks you have to give add up to precisely zero -- an attaccabottoni is telling you all about that shit anyway. And because his tale is so tragic, you look like the asshole for trying to get away.

#5. "Epibreren" (Dutch)

This Dutch word perfectly describes that particular flavor of procrastination that anyone who's ever done hard time in a cubicle will perfectly understand. You know how it goes: You're staring at your computer monitor filled with 36 open tabs of cat gifs (but only three with porn! We're proud of you!) when a co-worker walks up and asks for your help on an important project. You'll be damned if you're going to do actual work, so you quickly open an Excel spreadsheet and start typing random numbers, looking harried and busy. "So sorry, bro, I've got to get this, uh, meta-inventory report out by five."

In Holland, this is called "epibreren." Unlike most of the words on this list, "epibreren" is complete nonsense. Originally made up by a Dutch civil servant to get people to leave his line faster, it's designed to sound really opulent and complicated so that others will assume you're working on something they don't understand and simply leave you alone. In Dutch, words ending in "-eren" tend to be related to fancy things requiring lots of brain learnin' to understand, and since people generally don't like to admit that they haven't the slightest idea what the hell you're talking about, chances are they'll just shrug and assume your work is far too important for the likes of them to grasp.

Jupiterimages/Creatas/Getty Images"Shit, I'm so sorry I interrupted. Good luck with the Netflixeren project."

Of course, we're not sure how well it works now that everyone's in on the joke, but that's why it's perfect to import to the USA. "I'd totally help you out, but I've got a whole day of coding epibreren ahead of me."